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Whilst working on a project this week I had to access an image from a local directory on the hard drive through the FileMaker web viewer. It’s not as obvious as it might first appear. To start with you can’t just access the path directly.

Here’s a quick tip that might save some time of hunting through help files and forums.

So you start off with a path that’s something like this …

C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Images\My Image.jpg

If you copy and paste that into Internet Explorer you’ll find it works. But not so when you put it into the web viewer in FileMaker.

There are two key things you need to do.

1. Place some text in front of the path: “file:///”

2. FileMaker can’t intelligently translate the spaces in the path into URL, so you need a substitue command. Replacing all the spaces with %20

So your line in the web viewer will look something like this…

“file:///” & Substitute( “C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Images\My Image.jpg” ; ” ” ; “%20″  )

Hopefully the image now appears in your web viewer.

About Paul de Hallé

Paul de Hallé is the founder and Development Director of Linear Blue, having set up the company in 2000 to focus on intuitive database solutions and web integration. Paul is a FileMaker Certified developer on versions 7 to 11; and has also been a key player in the implementation of the FileMaker Certification program since it's inception with FileMaker 7. A regular guest speaker at FileMaker Business Alliance & Technet meetings in the UK and the FileMaker Developers Conference in the USA Paul is also a contributor to Advisor magazine, the leading industry Database publication.

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